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Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
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Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#82[dead]
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#83I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
And for such simple processors and systems no less! No descriptor tables to deal with, no memory management to configure. These days it takes a little processor inside the main processor, just to get things started. Those were golden times.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't there a 2000 source leak a while ago? I remember some exploits coming out after the leak.
Yes but it could not be legally used by anything.
OP said source available was acceptable. not even asking for compiler access which is also widely available.
Windows has always been more than modular enough for any repurposing and there were licenses that were not tied to specific hardware so you could use them even today.
Which is to say no one is stopping you from building a COPILOT.VBX for VisualBasic 3.0.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#85I cannot describe to you how jealous I am of the fact that back then writing a few thousand lines of assembly was what it took to launch a successful software company.
Replace Assembly with TypeScript/Rust/Go/whatever and as long as the idea is good and useful, same thing applies today.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#86wow, they had to OCR it back in from paper printouts > This source code is old enough that it hadn’t been stored digitally. “A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini,” calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group,” painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software strugg…
I'd like to hear more about what works in OCR of dot-matrix fonts. I've been able to OCR letter-quality printer output to 97% (mostly Os and Xs problems). But it seems that machine-learning text-recognition is also now biased to reject computer code because it doesn't look like human language.
Boring reply perhaps, but I've had wild success with adding even a tiny LLM afterwards to do "fixups" over OCRd text, works great for the typical O/0 issues and similar, just pass it the scrambled OCRd text together with the text around it, and even dumb and tiny 7b models running on CPU do a pretty fine job.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#87readable plain text plus boring metadata still ages better than most clever archival systems
In this case a paper printout.
Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#88Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#89Re: Microsoft open-sources “the earliest DOS source code discovered to date”
#90wow, they had to OCR it back in from paper printouts > This source code is old enough that it hadn’t been stored digitally. “A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini,” calling itself the “DOS Disassembly Group,” painstakingly transcribed and scanned in code from paper printouts provided by Paterson. This process was made even more difficult because modern OCR software strugg…
I'd like to hear more about what works in OCR of dot-matrix fonts. I've been able to OCR letter-quality printer output to 97% (mostly Os and Xs problems). But it seems that machine-learning text-recognition is also now biased to reject computer code because it doesn't look like human language.
ABBYY has a specific module for dot matrix printouts so I’m surprised it was a struggle for them but every document is different